And yet we find ourselves in another impossible war

July 30, 2010|By Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON — In the wake of last weekend's release of no fewer than 91,000 documents on the Afghan war — is that really all they could find? — the natural response was to compare it to the release of the Pentagon Papers.

It was in 1971 that former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg passed his soon-to-be-famous dossier on the Vietnam War to The New York Times. That 7,000-page narrative, a three-volume history of the war spanning a 22-year period, revealed patterns of deception leading to the war, the covert bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and outright lies, such as Lyndon Johnson's 1964 "promise" not to widen the war. The country was shocked.

But this year's release seemed more casual. Rather than official documents, the papers released by the anti-war Australian activist group WikiLeaks are a mass of unrelated and seemingly scattered (but still genuine) reports from every possible front, dealing with everything from drone strikes, to Pakistani perfidy, to Iranians assisting the Taliban.

Perhaps most important, however, is the curious fact that this time around, almost no one denies their authenticity. And just about everybody — from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to Pentagon commentators to civilian think-tank analysts — is effectively saying, "Oh well, nothing new here. After all, we knew all of this!"

Since no one is denying the documents' truth, apparently supplied by a disconsolate Army private, we have the right to ask: Did we all really "know" that the Pakistani intelligence agency (the infamous ISI), despite its busy history of quadruple- or quintuple-dealing, was aiding, abetting and even arming the Taliban that is fighting us? Or that so many civilians have been killed in what was supposed to be a "war on terrorism"? Or that, between 2001 and 2008, the CIA paid the entire budget of Afghanistan's spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary?

But upon reflection, none of it sounds strange after all. We just have not heard it put in so many words.

It is hardly accidental that we find ourselves harkening back to Vietnam, which so changed the world's perception of us. In fact, Vietnam was the first of our profoundly mistaken post-World War II "small wars," or, as I like to call them, "wars of choice" — in effect, wars that we didn't have to fight for our own security but which were fought on the bases of faulty hypotheses, such as, "If Vietnam falls, all of Southeast Asia falls."

But the failure in Vietnam, as painful as it was, with 50,000-plus Americans dead and countless millions of Asians dead and wounded, did not teach us the lesson it should have. After the Americans who fought in Vietnam came home to indifference if not hostility, the new American volunteer army and its generals had to have their wars.

And so we found them: Lebanon, Somalia, Panama and Grenada, and finally Iraq and Afghanistan, with offshoot smaller wars now in Somalia (yet again), Yemen, Mauritania and Mali. God only knows where else we are!

But this time, we're really in a stew. Vietnam and Cambodia, as horrible as they were, were places we could sail away from — it was humiliating, yes, but once it was over, it was over (for us, at least, if not for the Vietnamese and Cambodians we had so thoughtlessly involved in it).

But with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are embedded in the deepest parts of Central Asia and South Asia. Our interests and our military men and women are entangled with the regions' complex tribal patterns and unions. Recall Sartre's "No Exit" — the only exit here would be a horrendously expensive one: leaving Afghanistan in the vicious hands of the Taliban, leaving our international reputation in tatters, and handing over the future to the modern Huns.

Everyone knows that President Barack Obama hates this war. He said privately to the journalists he spoke with after last fall's review of Afghanistan, "Every alternative sucks." But for the country's first African-American president to withdraw from what the war machine of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got us into so deeply would have been a disaster for him politically.

On the other hand, all of the best analysts finally say that the presence of American servicemen and women in these countries is what inspires the suicide bombers, the terrorists and the insurgents. It's hard to "win" when this is the case.

Why does this blessed country — whose geographical place on the globe has protected it from the usual wars over land and power — continue to get itself into these unnecessary wars that are bleeding us to death? They are not only hard to win, they are impossible.